Photo of left-right: Quang Nguyen, Carlos Garcia and Mario Gonzalez. The Zuni cafe kitchen prep team of Quang Nguyen, Mario Gonzalez and Carlos Garcia. Chef-owner, Judy Rodgers calls them her "secret weapon" in her restaurant arsenal. These three have been working together more than a decade to help produce food at Zuni Cafe.
Event on 8/16/05 in San Francisco. Craig Lee / The Chronicle

Few restaurant kitchens are characterized by a Zen calm, but in one corner of Zuni Cafe's kitchen, an unexpected tranquility pervades. It's not without a buzz: Knives glide, elbows pump, fingers fly. Passions occasionally flare; a snatch of song rises from a baritone throat; a good-natured insult skims over the whirring salad spinner. But overall, it's peaceful.

In fact, they are not really secret, because Rodgers brags about them often. Accepting her 2003 Best Restaurant Award from the James Beard Foundation in New York, she thanked them, in particular Nguyen, for upholding the quality of the restaurant.

With its 25-year history and California-Mediterranean menu, 120-seat Zuni is a San Francisco institution. Rodgers has won Beard awards for best cookbook and best chef, as well as best restaurant. The beautiful, the powerful, the colorful and the tourists gather for its rustic, largely locally based cuisine that shows off California's agricultural largesse. However, few recognize that what Zuni serves on its plates begins in the trenches of the restaurant.

Garcia, Gonzalez and Nguyen are immigrants. Garcia is from Mexico, and Gonzalez is from Nicaragua. Nguyen is Vietnamese. The average age among the three men is 46; together, they have given 61 years to the restaurant.

Virtually every dish in the restaurant passes through their hands, from the romaine lettuce and the house-made anchovies for Zuni's celebrated Caesar salad, to the herbed and salted Fulton Valley Farms chickens for the signature roast chicken and the Sonoma County lamb carcasses that Nguyen breaks down into tenderloin, ribs, sausage makings and stock bones.

Worlds together

They are a radical anachronism in the American restaurant scene, encapsulating Third World and Old World values in a New World kitchen. They are so important that when Zuni recently remodeled the kitchen, the prep area was the first to be completed.

Nationwide, Hispanics make up about 17 percent of back-of-the-house restaurant employees; Asians comprise 4 percent, according to 2003 figures from the National Restaurant Association. The trio reflects those figures, but diverges when it comes to age and longevity.

The average age of restaurant workers is 25. The upstairs cooks at Zuni's open kitchen are, almost to a person, Caucasian, young and eager. Rodgers says most hold their positions for three years, then move on, seeking notches on their resume and culinary adventure.

The prep trio, by contrast, perseveres. Framed in Zuni's craft-honored kitchen, and by the immigrant passage, the three men have found a home and some measure of recognition in Rodgers' extended restaurant family.

In a groove

On a slow Monday morning, Gonzalez, 45, is mincing vegetables for duxelles, his left elbow beating a rapid, smooth rhythm. Garcia, 48, is stacking and washing romaine lettuce; Nguyen, 45, is going through a tray of calamari. His little knife, a flea-market model, moves through the squid with two liquid swipes, one to burst the ink sack, one to cut off tentacles.

The men look up and chat, courteous and smooth, like a jazz trio. They groove so well that they finish sentences for one another.

"Yeh, he speaks Spanish ..." Gonzalez says, looking up at Nguyen.

"But only bad words," Nguyen shoots back.

The sharp knives keep whizzing.

Do they have conflicts? "Yeah, we fight," begins one.

"If we don't fight, we haven't had a day," finishes another.

Although culture and language might segregate them, something stronger knits them together: stories. The tales of each man's escape from his homeland, entry to the United States and life today form the warp of their relationship. They tell these stories to one another as they work, weaving lessons into the telling.

Each supports family back in the old country and looks back wistfully, but they are what they are, transplants who no longer belong in the country they left. As Nguyen says, "If I live back there (Vietnam), I don't know who I am now."

Rodgers says she is moved to tears each time new details emerge.

Kitchen manager Rymee Trobaugh, 42, says, "I've heard them talking about being shifted around and getting BS and corruption back home. They share that.

"They have a deep respect for each other because they know the experience (of emigration) so well. I hear them having heated conversations about what could happen if they go back. They agree that back there is not the way you should have to live."

Besides the chatter at their stations, there is the single still moment in the day when they stop for lunch. Trobaugh joins them as they bring their lunch orders from the dumbwaiter to the basement table surrounded by lockers. Nguyen sometimes pulls out a bottle of soy sauce from his locker.

Other times, Gonzalez offers tastes of his salsa. They come from cultures that love soup; often they share a family-size bowl of instant Asian soup for breakfast. All of them relish the chicken wings saved in someone's locker from pulling roast chicken meat in the morning. Monosyllabic grunts prevail, as it is with most family table dialogue, but sometimes, stories of the passage emerge.

Finding their way to America

Nguyen, the senior member of the team, had a harrowing escape by boat from Vietnam. After 11 months in refugee camps, he landed in San Francisco and walked in Zuni's back door at age 20 to wash dishes. One day Rodgers plunked down a tray of chicken breasts and said she would come by to show him how to bone them. When she returned an hour later, he had finished them, precisely cut, squeaky-clean bones stacked to one side.

With his quicksilver deft touch and acute analysis of things structural, he moved up steadily. These days, he is the "father, teacher, czar, moneylender" of the kitchen, says Trobaugh. He is also the de facto knife sharpener for the crew, as well as the onsite mechanical engineer.

Gonzalez left the Nicaragua of the Sandinistas regime, and lived displaced for years in Costa Rica before coming to the United States. He started by opening oysters 20 years ago. Garcia, who began as a porter in the kitchen, walked across the border. As he tells the story, which the other two know well, they pipe in.

"Friends, they were always telling me they make easy money in America," Garcia begins, " but ..."

"They lied," all three chorus. They guffaw.

Like Garcia and Gonzalez, Nguyen's knife collection is simple. It consists of one chef's knife, less than $30, and a paring knife. They are ground to narrow slivers through persistent use. With these two utensils, he takes apart a side of meat with military precision. Then he begins on the next one.

"I treasure their consistency," says Trobaugh. He also treasures the comfortable, low-testosterone camaraderie. "We're not this extreme-macho, in-your-face, French-led young guys out of the CIA." Rodgers appreciates them as artisans. She values them for the detailed solutions they create for tasks, the result of patient repetition. "They've come up with clever ways to get things done, some of them just brilliant."

For example, when the onions in spring are especially pungent, Nguyen jerry-rigs a tiny desk fan by his station so as to divert the spray of onion juice away from his eyes. "This way, it's faster," he says.

Rodgers describes how Gonzalez can brown meat for stew like no one else, and how Garcia can look at a case of romaine and estimate yield perfectly. "They're the first line of defense with products. They can warn us about yields and taste.

"You can't learn that in school," says Rodgers. She recognizes that in material form, too: Their pay is equivalent to that of the culinary school-trained line cooks. With seniority, they make almost unheard of salaries as prep cooks. "What they do is as much a specialty and skill as cooking on the line," she says. This trio in particular "is constantly raising the bar on itself."

When new cooks come on the line, says Trobaugh, the first stop on the kitchen tour is the basement prep team where the Zen -- or middle-age wisdom -- prevails. These men personify pride in their work, he says, and, "I tell them these guys make your life easier."